Authors

Title

Date of Original Version

12-2009

Type

Conference Proceeding

Rights Management

All Rights Reserved

Abstract or Description

Many researchers have suggested that the psychological complexity of a concept is related to the length of its representation in a language o f thought. As yet, however, there are few concrete proposals about the nature o f this language. This paper makes one such proposal: the language of thought allow s first order quantification (quantification over objects) more readily than second-order quantification (quantification over features). To support this proposal we present behavioral results from a concept learning study inspired by the work of Shepard, Hovland and Jenkins